updated with a couple of links
Richard Siklos of The New York Times wonders whether we have given up on authenticity as a culture, whether “verisimilitude”–the appearance of authenticity–is now officially good enough for us.
Isn’t Mr. Siklos a little late to this party? His Times colleague Michiko Kakutani began decrying the apparent lack of value of the truth in our culture some weeks ago, linking author James Frey’s literary embroideries with the Bush administration’s purported fabrications about pre-Iraq war intelligence and many other policy decisions. She was wrong, as was their other colleague Frank Rich, who also picked up on the theme. They were scoring cheap political points while also meeting their obligations as opinion-makers, but never mind.
Siklos et al. are disingenuous. Americans addicted to the short-form storytelling methods of the media long ago gave up the search for authenticity in public figures and public life.
This is a theme I’ll return to again and again.
My thinking on it has evolved during a self-directed, intermittent, casual study of the culture informed by my lifelong weakness for stories (in book and movie form) and my inner sociologist/anthropologist.
The topic of authenticity was broached in a short essay by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in 1996:**
“The need to be enlightened and enfolded in bliss is probably best satisfied by God. Alas, God does not appear on talk shows or in the pages of Vanity Fair….
Our icons are women who cast themselves as role models. They are more approachable than God — at least we think they are. And they’re available….
In my youth, the noble exercise of living was to strive to be authentic and aware, true to oneself and to one’s experience lucidly observed. Nowadays, anybody can make copy by saying she reinvents herself — she isn’t on Wednesday what she was on Tuesday and nobody will trace the continuum….
Oprah reinvents herself: fat/skinny/fat/skinny. And we are invited to watch, and to share the tears. (Like a statue of a saint, she weeps. All performances public. All tears designed to heal.) Fonda reinvents herself as well. From Ho Chi Minh to No Pain No Gain to Consummate Trophy Wife (with cookbook). Stewart reinvents and multiplies her mediums (magazines, TV shows, cookies, cookie cutters and as many varieties of tulips as would occupy a forgotten football stadium, all stamped with her own copyrighted logo)….
The carryings-on of these behemoths are inescapably interesting to us because they do what they do for the reason we all do what we do: they want, as most of us do, to escape the end game and to find sustenance in the desert. Who can blame them? I wish, though, that they wouldn’t tend to be quite so messianic in the process. Oprah, for example, now refers to her audience as ‘America.’ I see the oily glint of zealotry in her eye. She tells us how to be. Unable to live in a world where ‘we are not alone,’ millions allow her to.”
For now, suffice it to say it is very clear that authenticity has long been glorified in private life but the object of deep suspicion in public life.
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**”Self-Fulfilling Prophets,” The New York Times Magazine, November 24, 1996
